Life, unfiltered

Working Wednesday: the ebbs and flows

Freelancing is scary to a lot of people because there’s no guarantee that you get a consistent paycheck. Sometimes work is slow, and sometimes work is fast. For the past few months I’ve been running close to idle at times. Granted, being idle was somewhat by design (or as idle as any working mother with twins can be!) but none the less, I was starting to get a bit antsy. I was also starting to question whether freelancing was the right choice.

Then things started to shift. In the past few weeks, leads started coming in and my clients started ramping up. I’m not sure where it’s coming from because I am not out, hard selling people. But I am talking to my contacts more frequently than I ever did, sitting miserably in a cubicle.

If my workflow was ebbing earlier this year, it’s certainly flowing (almost overflowing) lately. And it’s awesome. It’s exciting. It’s humbling to know that people think of me when they think of hiring a contractor. These feelings are what keeps freelancers going.

Today I turned to El Hombre (who’s now being pulled in on certain projects) to tell him that I might seriously consider contracting out some of my colleagues, just to make sure I don’t overload myself. It’s such a gratifying feeling to know that at this stage in my life, I don’t have to consider going back into an office any time soon. Because that’s my goal for myself professionally. It’s our goal for ourselves, personally.

And that got me thinking. So many people say that they aren’t meant to sit in an office, yet they resentfully trudge to work every day. It doesn’t have to be like that.

I spent way too much time sitting in traffic, stressed, angry and upset to not consider walking this path. But I also wasn’t impulsive about it. I bounced the idea off El Hombre so many times that he eventually told me he didn’t want to hear about it if I wasn’t going to do it. He always supported me, but I was nervous. I kept worrying about whether I would be successful, whether I would make enough money. But then I realized – I made good money but I wasn’t happy. And one day I thought about it differently – what if I kept making enough money that I would keep justifying not being happy. That I would continue to justify spending the majority of my waking hours doing something that damaged my health from the insane amounts of stress. So I made a plan.

I started saving up. I cut expenses (which wasn’t hard – I basically went back to my life when I was crippled by student load debt) and I started chatting with people in my network who freelanced to get an idea of the highs and lows that I should expect